The fabliau (plural fabliaux or "'fablieaux'") is
a comic, usually anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France circa the
13th
Century. They are generally bawdy in nature, and several of
them were reworked by Geoffrey
Chaucer for his Canterbury
Tales. Some 150 French fabliaux are extant depending on how
narrowly fabliau is defined.

Typical fabliaux concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious
clergy, and foolish
peasants. The status of
peasants appears to vary based on the audience for which the
fabliau was being written. Poems that were presumably written for
the nobility portray
peasants (vilains in French)
as stupid and vile, whereas those written for the lower classes
often tell of peasants getting the better of the clergy.

The fabliau gradually disappeared at the
beginning of the 16th century. It was replaced by the proseshort story.
Famous French writers such as Molière,
Jean
de La Fontaine and Voltaire owe much
to the tradition of the fabliau, in their prose works as well as in
their poetry.

Example tales

In "L'enfant de neige" ("The snow baby"), we hear
a tale of black
comedy. A merchant returns home after an absence of two years
to find his wife with a newborn son. She explains one snowy day she
swallowed a snowflake while thinking about her husband which caused
her to conceive. Pretending to believe the "miracle", they raise
the boy until the age of 15 when the merchant takes him on a
business trip to Genoa. There, he
sells the boy into slavery. On his return, he
explains to his wife that the sun burns bright and hot in Italy. Since he was
begotten by a snowflake, he melted in the heat.